Discography search

Sound Files

Document Contents

Purely coincidental? Joyce Hatto and Chopin's Mazurkas

Nicholas Cook and Craig Sapp

The story of Joyce Hatto is one of the most inspirational in recent musical
history. Born in 1928, she was known through the 1950s and 60s as a concert and
recording pianist specializing in twentieth-century British music, Liszt, and
Chopin. In 1970, however, she was diagnosed with cancer, which prompted her
withdrawal from the concert hall by the end of the decade. For twenty years she
was little heard of. But then came the extraordinary final phase of Hatto's
career, in the form of an outpouring of recordings that encompass many of the
summits of the pianistic repertory from Scarlatti to Messiaen. The Presto
Classical website currently lists a total of 104 CDs issued on the Concert
Artist/Fidelio label owned by Hatto's husband and (in Ateş Orga's words) 'unsung
producer', William Barrington-Coupe; most of these have been issued since 2003,
but the recording dates range from 1989 up to shortly before Hatto's death at
the age of 77 in June 2006. Critical response to the recordings varies, as
critical response always does, but Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe
spoke for many when in 2005 he described her as 'the greatest living pianist
that almost no one has ever heard of'.

'Comparatively little of the Joyce of those days', Orga writes of the period
before Hatto's illness, 'was to give any indication of the flood, the
phoenix-like re-invention of herself, to come twenty, thirty years later'. But
what makes the story of the Joyce Hatto recordings the more astonishing is the
contrast between the acute difficulties of her everyday life and the scale of
her output. Dyer's obituary tells us that 'Miss Hatto underwent five major
surgeries and for the last 10 years of her life was hospitalized for several
days every seven weeks—68 scheduled trips to the hospital in all'. (He also
tells us that she recorded materials for about 50 further CDs, now awaiting
production.) No wonder then that Orga's MusicWeb obituary refers to
Hatto's 'superhuman energy'; elsewhere he details one of her marathon recording
sessions ('assuming correct documentation', he notes), and adds, 'impossible,
many cynics would uphold'. Bryce Morrison's Gramophone review of the
Liszt and Chopin-Godowsky studies (2006) similarly refers to the 'doubting
Thomases, of which there are apparently many', who 'may well wonder how Joyce
Hatto achieved such unalloyed mastery and musicianship when tragically beset
with ill-health. But others will surely celebrate an awe-inspiring triumph of
mind over matter, of the indomitable nature of the human spirit'.

Readers of Gramophone will have picked up Morrison's reference to the
controversy following Jeremy Nicholas' article 'Piano Dreams' in the March 2006
issue of that journal: a number of readers wrote in to question various aspects
of the story, for example whether Hatto was really ill or even whether the
recordings issued in her name were hers at all, and in the July 2006 issue
Nicholas challenged the doubters to substantiate their accusations by providing
evidence that would 'stand up in a court of law'. There were no takers, but the
mutterings continued. Indeed they were given a new lease of life in what one
contributor called 'one of the most bizarre threads in the history of this
newsgroup' ('Hatto hoax?', on rec.music.classical.recordings). It started when,
in January 2007, a contributor to the group who had recently purchased some of
Hatto's CDs reported, 'I have noticed something eerie: that the pianist playing
the Mozart sonatas cannot be the pianist playing Prokoviev or
the pianist playing Albeniz. I have the distinct feeling of being the victim of
some sort of hoax. Does anyone else share these feelings?'

A few contributors offered reasoned responses. One attacked the basic premise of
stylistic consistency: 'Many pianists have personalities that vary greatly with
repertoire. I have heard pianists seemingly transform personalities within the
space of one recital on countless occasions'. Another questioned what the
motivation of any such hoax could possibly be, asking 'why on earth any pianist
would choose to go into a studio and record literally hundreds of works in the
sure and certain advance knowledge that they would all be issued under someone
else's name'. Other contributors, however, resorted to simple counter-assertion:
the first response to the original posting read 'You are wrong. I suggest that
you trade in your ears for another set.' But nobody had any hard evidence, and
the discussion increasingly floated free from reality, at one point questioning
whether such a person as Joyce Hatto had ever existed. The thread ended, as such
threads usually do, in a series of flames, although one of the later
contributions summed up the feeling that perhaps lay behind the whole
controversy: 'It is hard to believe that one pianist unknown to us suddenly
plays every composition in the repertoire better than any other pianist ever
did'. Precisely those qualities that elicited some listeners' admiration, it
seems, provoked disbelief in others.

The AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded
Music (CHARM) was established in 2004 at Royal Holloway, University of
London, in partnership with King's College London and the University of
Sheffield. Its mission is to promote the study of recordings within musicology,
and its portfolio of activities include a project on recordings of Chopin's
mazurkas. We have to date built up an archive of over 1500 recordings of
individual mazurkas, including nearly 30 complete sets, and the purpose of the
project is to devise computational methods for extracting and analysing
musically significant information from recordings. Our focus is principally on
timing and dynamic information, and on this basis we hope to draw conclusions
regarding, for example, the discovery of historical trends in Chopin performance
and the characterisation of different national styles of playing. But as will
become clear, other kinds of conclusion can also be drawn from the techniques we
have developed.

We make considerable use of different forms of visualisation, including what we
call 'timescapes'. As the name implies, these are based on timing information,
specifically the duration of each beat in the performance: what they show is
where in a particular recording one pianist's rubato is most like another's. A
particular advantage is that they compare relative timings, in other
words they show relationships that would otherwise be hidden by the fact that
one recording is globally faster or slower than another. (In general it's
relative rather than absolute timing that matters most in characterising
pianistic style.) A typical example is Figure 1, which shows Arthur Rubinstein's
1939 recording of the Mazurka Op. 68 No. 3; the colours indicate which other
recording Rubinstein's most resembles at each point. (Each recording is
represented by a different colour.) The horizontal axis represents musical time,
from the beginning to the end of the piece, while the vertical axis shows how
far the similarities persist into the higher-level structure of the piece. What
Figure 1 is saying is that on the large scale, the first third or so of
Rubinstein's 1939 recording is most like his own 1966 recording (represented by
the large patch of orange), but thereafter it is closer to the grand average of
all the recordings for which we have data (that's the black). Elsewhere, in
particular close to the bottom of the triangle, there are flecks of different
colours, which represent more fleeting similarities to a number of other
recordings, without any very obvious patterns emerging.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 1 is typical of the way different recordings relate to one another; this
is how we expect timescapes to look. Occasionally, however, we find a quite
different sort of picture, as in Figure 2. This shows the recording of Op. 68
No. 3 by Jerzy Śmidowicz on the compilation Fryderyk Chopin, Complete Works:
The Golden Age of Polish Pianists (Muza PNCD 300), and it looks the way
it does because of its extreme similarity to the Śmidowicz recording on The
Great Polish Chopin Tradition V: Śmidowicz (Selene CD-s 9905.50).
Actually they are more than similar: they are reissues of the same original
recording, first released in 1948 (Muza 1345), and the small markings at the
bottom of Figure 2 merely reflect limitations in the accuracy of data capture.

Normally such duplications of the same recording on different releases or
reissues occasion no surprise. We were, however, taken aback when we saw the
very similar image at Figure 3. This shows the Joyce Hatto recording of Op. 68
No. 3, taken from the Concert Artist/Fidelio box set Chopin: The
Mazurkas, which was released in 2006 (CACD 20012). According to the booklet
accompaying the CDs, the recordings were made at Concert Artist Studios,
Cambridge, on 27 April 1997 and 19 March 2004, though the slipcase changes the
latter date to December 2005; the Concert Artists website adds the information
that the recording was 'revised by Joyce Hatto shortly before she died' and
'completely remastered'. But all this is puzzling, because what Figure 3 shows
is that this recording of Op. 68 No. 3 is virtually indistinguishable from that
on a commercial recording credited to Eugen Indjic. Currently available on the
Calliope label (Intégrale des mazurkas: Frédéric Chopin, 3321), this
recording was first issued in 1988 by Claves (Chopin: 57 Mazurkas, CD
50-8812/13). Nor is it just Op. 68 No. 3 which exhibits this apparent identity:
Figure 4 shows the Mazurka Op. 17 No. 4, and again the Hatto and Indjic
recordings are virtually indistinguishable.

Figure 3

Figure 4

Timescapes are one way of expressing the relationship between the timing of
different recorded performances; another is statistical (Pearson) correlation,
where 1 represents total identity and 0 the lack of any relationship. The
following table shows correlations for both Op. 17 No. 4 and Op. 68 No. 3, in
each case comparing the relationship between the Hatto and Indjic recordings
with relationships between different recordings by the same perfomer (Rubinstein
1939 and 1966), and recordings by different pianists (Indjic and Rubinstein
1939).

Op. 17 No. 4

Hatto/Indjic

0.996

Rubinstein 1939/1966

0.799

Indjic/Rubinstein 1939

0.616

Average of all recordings

0.641

Op. 68 No. 3

Hatto/Indjic

0.996

Śmidowicz (two reissues)

0.993

Rubinstein 1939/1966

0.773

Indjic/Rubinstein 1939

0.664

Average of all recordings

0.782

The figure of 0.996 for the Hatto and Indjic recordings of Op. 68 No. 4, as
against 0.993 for the two reissues of the same Śmidowicz recording, is saying
that the Hatto and Indjic recordings of Op. 17 No. 4 resemble one another just
as closely as do the two releases of the same Śmidowicz performance. (The
figures are not 1.00 because of limitations in the accuracy of data capture.)
And it's the same story for the complete set of mazurkas. Both the Hatto and
Indjic recordings contain the same 57 mazurkas, although this is not obvious at
first sight, since the works without opus number appear in different places, and
for some reason Op. 41 No. 1 appears twice on the Hatto set (at the end of the
first CD and again at the beginning of the second). In addition the durations of
the tracks vary slightly. This is partly because they incorporate varying
amounts of silence at the beginning or end of the track, but it is also because
they play at slightly different speeds; in the case of Op. 17 No. 4 the Hatto
version plays about 0.7% slower, whereas in the case of Op. 68 No. 3 it is 2.8%
slower—and in the case of another mazurka, Op. 24 No. 2, it is 1.2% faster.
(Because our timescapes are based on relative timing, they show the similarities
between the recordings despite these changes.) Even with the timing changes,
however, the correlation for the entire set of track durations is far closer for
the Hatto and Indjic sets than for the others:

Hatto/Indjic

0.999

Rubinstein 1939/1966

0.971

Indjic/Rubinstein 1939

0.954

Average of all recordings

0.909

These graphic and statistical analyses are valuable in that they bring a degree
of objectivity to the comparison between the recordings. For many readers,
however, the most convincing demonstration of the relationship between them may
simply be to listen to them side by side. While we would recommend purchasing
the original CDs for this purpose (both are readily available), we have made a
demonstration available here: this is a version of Op. 17 No. 4 in
which the left track is taken from CACD 20012 and the right track from Calliope
3321, with the timing of the latter slowed down by 0.7% so that the two
recordings synchronize. (In each case we have used the left track of the
original recording.) We believe that for most readers this will settle the
matter.

The primary purpose of this article has to provide an insight into the potential
of the computer-based methods of analysing recordings we are developing at
CHARM: approaches which might be considered of purely academic interest turn out
to have very practical applications. But there is only so much that analysis can
achieve. We have documented the similarities between CACD 20012 and Calliope
3321, which in our opinion demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that, despite the
packaging, both recordings are of the same performance (or set of performances).
We have no basis on which to speculate as to how this situation might have come
about. It would, however, be very desirable for those who are in a position to
clarify this to do so. In the obituary of Hatto which he published in The
Independent, Ateş Orga cited the judgement of the American pianist and
Horowitz pupil, Ivan Davis, that Hatto 'will have extraordinary posthumous
acclaim'. There is a danger that, in the absence of such clarification,
uncertainty as to the nature and extent of Hatto's recorded legacy may undermine
the lasting reputation of a remarkable musician. That would be a sad end to an
inspirational career.